Yelp

Another acquisition for Yelp that will take the local listings company even deeper into commerce and food-related services. It’s gobbling up Eat24, a U.S. food delivery business that competes with GrubHub, Delivery.com and others in the area of delivering food on behalf of various restaurants. Yelp is paying $134 million for Eat24, with $75 million in cash and the rest in Yelp shares… Read More

Google is rolling out a “Local Guides” program in an update to Google Maps – a move that seemingly sees the company taking on “Yelp’s Elites” – that is, Yelp’s program where local users gain the status of tastemaker and get invited to special events and parties. Google introduced Local Guides last month by way of a Google+ post, which then… Read More

One of the biggest and most influential review platforms in the world, Yelp has constantly been hit with claims that it manipulates reviews so its advertisers get higher rankings. This led to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in early 2014 after 2,045 complaints were filed against the company. Now Yelp says the FTC has closed its investigation into Yelp’s business… Read More

We’re all critics, whether we Like it or not. Our Facebook posts are implicit reviews and recommendations of restaurants, apps, movies, news articles, dry cleaners, and even whole cities. Now, Facebook’s new keyword post search is unlocking the value of the opinions we share but never put on review sites like Yelp, Annie’s List, MetaCritic, or the App Store.
Of course… Read More

Yelp continues with its march across Europe to build up its reach in local listings in the region. Today, the company announced the acquisition of Cityvox, a reviews site in France that focuses on restaurants and nightlife and “providing great consumer insights for businesses ranging from restaurants and brassieres to cinemas and clubs, basically any business falling into the… Read More

Yelp has boosted its presence in Europe after announcing the acquisition of Restaurant-Kritik, a restaurant review service in Germany. Restaurant-Kritik claims to have over 330,000 reviews of more than 94,000 restaurants across Germany. Read More

Yelp has partnered with Hipmunk to allow people to book hotels within the business review platform. While this is not the first time Yelp has offered a way for users to purchase from businesses right on its site, it is the first time it’s done this with hotel bookings.
Yelp says the idea is that people will book a place to stay immediately after reading the Yelp reviews on it. This creates… Read More

Yesterday Yelp reported its second quarter earnings, beating on revenue, and announcing that it was profitable in the period, a first for the company.
Its shares rose, and then fell in after-hours trading. Yelp opened down today, and is currently off nearly 12%.
What’s going on? With $88.8 million in revenue, and $0.04 in per-share profit, Yelp more than hit its big numbers. However… Read More

Today after the bell Yelp reported its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $88.79 million, and a profit of $0.04 per share. The company had net income of $2.7 million in the period, up from a $878,000 loss in the year-ago quarter.
Investors had expected Yelp to lose 3 cents per share on revenue of $86.32 million. The company’s revenue tally for its most recent… Read More

Yelp wants as many inroads and reminders for its service around the web as possible, so today it upped the limit on its API for pulling nearby places, ratings, and photos from 100 calls a day to 25,000 without the need for pre-approval. By freeing up usage of its API, Yelp becomes more appealing to developers looking to help people discover local businesses, and could persuade them to use… Read More

Documents leaked to TechCrunch from inside Yelp allege that Google is manipulating its search results to favor Google+ content over Yelp content. The materials accuse Google of blatantly highlighting its own products in searches made in the US but not in Europe in order to avoid angering EU regulators who are reviewing Google anti-trust complaints. Read More

Just as Google looked to be nearing the end of a long-running EU antitrust investigation, Yelp, which competes vertically with Mountain View in local search, has thrown a spanner in the works by filing a formal complaint. It was already a witness in the case, but, via a letter to Europe’s Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, the U.S. company has thrown its full weight behind… Read More

Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google, continues apace with its strategy to launch more products that stretch it beyond basic search. Today, it is tackling the business of local search with Yandex.City, an iOS, Android and web app that aggregates user reviews on restaurants, bars, shops, auto mechanics and more and then plots the results on a map based on what you’re looking for… Read More

The $2.6 billion acquisition of OpenTable by Priceline bounced a number of companies’ share prices today, including a 3.91 percent rise for Groupon, and a 2.39 percent bump for Zillow. Yelp, however, shot north 13.79 percent.
Investors seem to be betting that, in the wake of the OpenTable deal — executed at a more than 40 percent premium — other companies that are local… Read More

We’re using apps on our smartphones and tablets much more to look things up now, according to a new report out from eMarketer. That means a serious drop in ad revenue for many of the major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo.
According to eMarketer, Google mobile ads saw a dramatic 17 percent drop in revenue from 2012. The search giant owned 82.8 percent of the $2.24 billion search… Read More

Foursquare escalated its battle versus Yelp and Google today with a blog post explaining that its redesigned app will beat their “one-size-fits-all results” that users get “regardless of their interests or places they’ve been before”. Foursquare explains it transplanted checkins into its Swarm standalone app to let the forthcoming overhaul of its main app focus… Read More

After the closing of regular trading today, Yelp reported its first quarter financial performance, including revenue of $76.4 million, and earnings per share of -$0.04. The market had expected the company to lose $0.06 cents on revenue of $75.06 million. Read More

Today Yahoo announced that it has partnered with Yelp to bring local data into its search experience, both mobile and desktop. The deal will see traditional Yelp information, such as ratings and user photos piped into Yahoo. Put another way, Yahoo’s search is now flavored with more third-party data that it lacks.
Yahoo is no longer a company known for its search products, having… Read More

Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that has become the web’s go-to resource for reviews of local businesses since launching in 2004, announced its 2013 third quarter earnings after the market closed this afternoon. For the second straight quarter, the company beat expectations, with revenue coming in at $61.2 million in the third quarter and a per-share loss of… Read More